Machine learning is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. In the past decade, machine learning has given us self-driving cars, practical speech recognition, effective web search, and a vastly improved understanding of the human genome. Machine learning is so pervasive today that you probably use it dozens of times a day without knowing it. Many researchers also think it is the best way to make progress towards human-level AI. In this class, you will learn about the most effective machine learning techniques, and gain practice implementing them and getting them to work for yourself. More importantly, you'll learn about not only the theoretical underpinnings of learning, but also gain the practical know-how needed to quickly and powerfully apply these techniques to new problems. Finally, you'll learn about some of Silicon Valley's best practices in innovation as it pertains to machine learning and AI.
This course provides a broad introduction to machine learning, datamining, and statistical pattern recognition. Topics include: (i) Supervised learning (parametric/non-parametric algorithms, support vector machines, kernels, neural networks). (ii) Unsupervised learning (clustering, dimensionality reduction, recommender systems, deep learning). (iii) Best practices in machine learning (bias/variance theory; innovation process in machine learning and AI). The course will also draw from numerous case studies and applications, so that you'll also learn how to apply learning algorithms to building smart robots (perception, control), text understanding (web search, anti-spam), computer vision, medical informatics, audio, database mining, and other areas.

Unterrichtet von

Andrew Ng

Skript

In this video, I'd like to start talking about a second type of unsupervised learning problem called dimensionality reduction. There are a couple of different reasons why one might want to do dimensionality reduction. One is data compression, and as we'll see later, a few videos later, data compression not only allows us to compress the data and have it therefore use up less computer memory or disk space, but it will also allow us to speed up our learning algorithms. But first, let's start by talking about what is dimensionality reduction. As a motivating example, let's say that we've collected a data set with many, many, many features, and I've plotted just two of them here. And let's say that unknown to us two of the features were actually the length of something in centimeters, and a different feature, x2, is the length of the same thing in inches. So, this gives us a highly redundant representation and maybe instead of having two separate features x1 then x2, both of which basically measure the length, maybe what we want to do is reduce the data to one-dimensional and just have one number measuring this length. In case this example seems a bit contrived, this centimeter and inches example is actually not that unrealistic, and not that different from things that I see happening in industry. If you have hundreds or thousands of features, it is often this easy to lose track of exactly what features you have. And sometimes may have a few different engineering teams, maybe one engineering team gives you two hundred features, a second engineering team gives you another three hundred features, and a third engineering team gives you five hundred features so you have a thousand features all together, and it actually becomes hard to keep track of you know, exactly which features you got from which team, and it's actually not that want to have highly redundant features like these. And so if the length in centimeters were rounded off to the nearest centimeter and lengthened inches was rounded off to the nearest inch. Then, that's why these examples don't lie perfectly on a straight line, because of, you know, round-off error to the nearest centimeter or the nearest inch. And if we can reduce the data to one dimension instead of two dimensions, that reduces the redundancy. For a different example, again maybe when there seems fairly less contrives. For may years I've been working with autonomous helicopter pilots. Or I've been working with pilots that fly helicopters. And so. If you were to measure--if you were to, you know, do a survey or do a test of these different pilots--you might have one feature, x1, which is maybe the skill of these helicopter pilots, and maybe "x2" could be the pilot enjoyment. That is, you know, how much they enjoy flying, and maybe these two features will be highly correlated. And what you really care about might be this sort of this sort of, this direction, a different feature that really measures pilot aptitude. And I'm making up the name aptitude of course, but again, if you highly correlated features, maybe you really want to reduce the dimension. So, let me say a little bit more about what it really means to reduce the dimension of the data from 2 dimensions down from 2D to 1 dimensional or to 1D. Let me color in these examples by using different colors. And in this case by reducing the dimension what I mean is that I would like to find maybe this line, this, you know, direction on which most of the data seems to lie and project all the data onto that line which is true, and by doing so, what I can do is just measure the position of each of the examples on that line. And what I can do is come up with a new feature, z1, and to specify the position on the line I need only one number, so it says z1 is a new feature that specifies the location of each of those points on this green line. And what this means, is that where as previously if i had an example x1, maybe this was my first example, x1. So in order to represent x1 originally x1. I needed a two dimensional number, or a two dimensional feature vector. Instead now I can represent z1. I could use just z1 to represent my first example, and that's going to be a real number. And similarly x2 you know, if x2 is my second example there, then previously, whereas this required two numbers to represent if I instead compute the projection of that black cross onto the line. And now I only need one real number which is z2 to represent the location of this point z2 on the line. And so on through my M examples. So, just to summarize, if we allow ourselves to approximate the original data set by projecting all of my original examples onto this green line over here, then I need only one number, I need only real number to specify the position of a point on the line, and so what I can do is therefore use just one number to represent the location of each of my training examples after they've been projected onto that green line. So this is an approximation to the original training self because I have projected all of my training examples onto a line. But now, I need to keep around only one number for each of my examples. And so this halves the memory requirement, or a space requirement, or what have you, for how to store my data. And perhaps more interestingly, more importantly, what we'll see later, in the later video as well is that this will allow us to make our learning algorithms run more quickly as well. And that is actually, perhaps, even the more interesting application of this data compression rather than reducing the memory or disk space requirement for storing the data. On the previous slide we showed an example of reducing data from 2D to 1D. On this slide, I'm going to show another example of reducing data from three dimensional 3D to two dimensional 2D. By the way, in the more typical example of dimensionality reduction we might have a thousand dimensional data or 1000D data that we might want to reduce to let's say a hundred dimensional or 100D, but because of the limitations of what I can plot on the slide. I'm going to use examples of 3D to 2D, or 2D to 1D. So, let's have a data set like that shown here. And so, I would have a set of examples x(i) which are points in r3. So, I have three dimension examples. I know it might be a little bit hard to see this on the slide, but I'll show a 3D point cloud in a little bit. And it might be hard to see here, but all of this data maybe lies roughly on the plane, like so. And so what we can do with dimensionality reduction, is take all of this data and project the data down onto a two dimensional plane. So, here what I've done is, I've taken all the data and I've projected all of the data, so that it all lies on the plane. Now, finally, in order to specify the location of a point within a plane, we need two numbers, right? We need to, maybe, specify the location of a point along this axis, and then also specify it's location along that axis. So, we need two numbers, maybe called z1 and z2 to specify the location of a point within a plane. And so, what that means, is that we can now represent each example, each training example, using two numbers that I've drawn here, z1, and z2. So, our data can be represented using vector z which are in r2. And these subscript, z subscript 1, z subscript 2, what I just mean by that is that my vectors here, z, you know, are two dimensional vectors, z1, z2. And so if I have some particular examples, z(i), or that's the two dimensional vector, z(i)1, z(i)2. And on the previous slide when I was reducing data to one dimensional data then I had only z1, right? And that is what a z1 subscript 1 on the previous slide was, but here I have two dimensional data, so I have z1 and z2 as the two components of the data. Now, let me just make sure that these figures make sense. So let me just reshow these exact three figures again but with 3D plots. So the process we went through was that shown in the lab is the optimal data set, in the middle the data set projects on the 2D, and on the right the 2D data sets with z1 and z2 as the axis. Let's look at them a little bit further. Here's my original data set, shown on the left, and so I had started off with a 3D point cloud like so, where the axis are labeled x1, x2, x3, and so there's a 3D point but most of the data, maybe roughly lies on some, you know, not too far from some 2D plain. So, what we can do is take this data and here's my middle figure. I'm going to project it onto 2D. So, I've projected this data so that all of it now lies on this 2D surface. As you can see all the data lies on a plane, 'cause we've projected everything onto a plane, and so what this means is that now I need only two numbers, z1 and z2, to represent the location of point on the plane. And so that's the process that we can go through to reduce our data from three dimensional to two dimensional. So that's dimensionality reduction and how we can use it to compress our data. And as we'll see later this will allow us to make some of our learning algorithms run much later as well, but we'll get to that only in a later video.